does anyone know much about the biological content of clouds? I keep asking in the cell biology discussion area and my question keeps getting taken off. I know that clouds harbour small amounts of biomatter, including bacteria. This is the micro organism discussion area. can anyone help me? I'm just a curious student.

First of all: YOUR QUESTIONS ARE NOT TAKEN OFF. Just moved. We never delete logical questions, we just move them. There are a few "clouds" topics in general dicussion. Maybe you can just have a few minutes to find them.
Regards...

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How charged with punishment the scroll
I am the Master of my fate
I am the Captain of my soul.

it's not a bad question. i mean, all kinds of critters live in the atmosphere, from bacteria to microscopic fungi to plant spores discovered almost at the very threshhold of the sky. they're subject to all kinds of different conditions to "land bound" life. higher levels of uv radiation; with implications for mutation and all kinds of differentiation. the closest thing they know to an aqueous environment is the interior of clouds. clouds exist in all three phases at times. they contain hydrocarbons and all manner of organic chemicals. plus, as we all know, clouds can carry trememdous electrical charges. i have no idea what the inside of a cloud is like, but i'm sure it poses new challenges for whatever lives inside it. these creatures can form the nuclei for raindrops. whose to say that some time in the distant past this exact process didn't happen inside some oily supercharged cloud, whereby a fragment of naked dna or rna, newly coalesced from whatever prebiotic conditions existed back then suddenly found itself inside a tiny sphere of water, loaded with organic chemicals and itself encapsulated within a simple lipid layer.? protobionts are able to form spontaneously today. in the reducing, turbulent conditions back then, who knows? that's why i'm asking about clouds. they have relevance to some life.

the biological contents of clouds depends on how the planet is born with what gasses, If a planet is born with methane and is formed with volcanos then it will be very gasious and dangerous, unlike the earth where it was born with oxygen, hydrogen and some other gasious contents with a couple different enviornments on it...

chicoguardian wrote:the biological contents of clouds depends on how the planet is born with what gasses, If a planet is born with methane and is formed with volcanos then it will be very gasious and dangerous, unlike the earth where it was born with oxygen, hydrogen and some other gasious contents with a couple different enviornments on it...

I thought the big theory or thought was that Earth's nebula gave our first atmosphere (the Primordial atmosphere) was made up of water, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, methane, sulfur, iodine, and chlorine and then surface water accumulated, and then there were bacteria and then photosynthesis started happening and things went nuts from there. But what I've learned was there was a lot of outgassing from volcanoes that helped shaped Earth's atmosphere from 4 billion years ago even up to a half a billion years ago.
So Earth had oxegen and hyrogen but it had methane and other dangerous gases also. So, even if it starts out like that a planet can change over time. Although that probably wouldn't be possible if there wasn't any H2O in the nebula.

Man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. - Henry Benson